Blue Sky Thinking: With Australian conservative politics at one of its lowest ebbs, Sharri Markson, along with much of the Sky News cohort, is trying to find the guy who did this, as well as offer a way out. It cannot be done, she says, under “a mediocre or untested politician”. She has an interesting suggestion for a solution:
Yep, she advocates for the return, as leader, of former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, possibly the highest profile victim of the teal movement in 2022. There is a double irony here. Firstly, in Sky having the nerve to offer any advice at all: departed opposition leader Peter Dutton took his understanding of cut-through issues almost entirely from the network, and it helped him produce a campaign that engaged voters the way Sideshow Bob engages rakes.
Secondly, the choice of Frydenberg is particularly wild for Sky. Anyone who would have backed a more moderate candidate like Frydenberg would likely no longer vote for the party, due to the network’s success in pushing the Liberal Party’s priorities so much further to the right.
The sweetest victory of all: Ange Postecoglou, Tottenham Hotspur’s Australian manager, has this morning become the first ever non-European or Argentinian to win a European trophy with his side’s 1-0 win over Manchester United in the Europa League final. Any auspol hack would approve of his marking of the moment:
“There’s a quote from my favourite Australian prime minister, Paul Keating. He said, ‘This is one for the true believers,’ and this is certainly one for the true believers,” he said. One wonders if an AUKUS-delivered submarine could break down Tottenham’s parked bus better than United. Anyway, enjoy your lunch, everyone.
Postecoglou’s win gave Spurs their first silverware since George W. Bush was US president, and with it, he enters the conversation of greatest Australian coaches in any sport, despite having been mocked at every turn by snobbish European football pundits.
Price controls: Speaking of people who definitely have nothing to do with the state of the modern Liberal Party — right-wing activist group Advance is continuing to take its dubious post-election victory lap with the help of Senator for Sky News Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
In an email sent yesterday under her name, touting the wipeout of the Greens (and thus further empowerment of Labor, the outcome presumably they were trying to avoid with the millions spent ahead of the 2025 vote), Price argues, “For me, as a member of the Coalition, this election was a gut punch, and I know so many of you feel the same way.”
God, how is she going to feel when she hears about what happened to the Coalition? I suppose, given everything that’s gone on lately, she can be forgiven for some confusion.
Daily Nonsense: Let’s just shut this bullshit down right now, shall we? The Daily Mail repackaged, as is its wont, an interview 2GB conducted with Leith Van Onselen (Peter’s cousin) under the headline “Did high immigration WIN Anthony Albanese the election?”
The piece heavily implies that the net migration of 528,000 in 2022-23, followed by 435,000 in 2023-24, had something to do with Labor’s stonking win in May. Of course, neither the Mail nor Van Onselen explicitly say that, because it would be palpable, demonstrable nonsense. No-one who arrived since Labor took office in 2022 could conceivably cast a vote in its favour because they couldn’t have become citizens yet.
LVO does, however, say, “Labor is incentivised to maintain a high immigration policy because it’s effectively importing future voters.” Of course, the notion that left-leaning elites are importing vast sums of non-white citizens to alter society and entrench power is a huge tenet of the dangerous “Great Replacement Theory” that some figures on the right have been trying to mainstream for a while.
Ai ai: The Chicago Sun-Times has often grazed against history in ways that reveal something of the future of the industry. Among the eight Pulitzer Prizes is the first-ever awarded to a film critic, for the organ’s long-time writer Roger Ebert — the first of now dozens of Pulitizers for film writing.
After a brief and tumultuous period of ownership in the mid-80s (during which the paper was edited by Australia’s Frank Devine), Rupert Murdoch sold the paper and bought its former sister TV station, WFLD-TV, one of the pillars for his initial launch of the Fox Broadcasting Corporation. And earlier this week, in what we fear might be an equally foreboding moment, the paper published an upcoming summer book-reading list that was AI-generated: there was no byline and at least 10 of the titles so glowingly reviewed do not exist.
The list of made-up books includes a “climate fiction novel” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir about a rogue AI that gains sentience. The Chicago Sun issued a statement blaming King Features, “a unit of Hearst, one of our national content partners”, which provided the syndicated material. Of course, this is no exoneration, unless the printing presses are also activated with no human input.
You have you part two: [Editor’s note: This tip is written by Jack Callil, Crikey’s deputy editor, who pleaded with his colleagues to allow him to “write a hate tip” which could go into the “1000s of words” just on this subject alone.]
Darren Aronosfsky, a director who is to making films what a sack of mouldy potatoes is to making films — and is responsible for, and I’m not overdoing it here, some of the most pretentious, convoluted, navel-gazing, condescending, lazy films in living memory — has proven his absolutely devotion and respect to the craft by launching a generative AI storytelling venture in which he will partner with Google DeepMind to produce short films.
It’s fitting, seeing as his career’s work is just talentlessly regurgitating vague ideas of cinema making, like when you ask ChatGPT to remake the same image over and over again. Sometimes there comes a time when the intricate shifting vagaries of the cosmos align and you find yourself in agreement with Ben Shapiro. (Fine, Black Swan is okay.)